Amazon.com Review
Some readers anxiously monitor each year's O. Henry anthology like doctors taking vital signs at a bedside, looking for clues to the current state of the American short story. Good news: the patient is alive and well--it's officially time to stop monitoring her pulse. Chosen by this year's prize jury (Sherman Alexie, Lorrie Moore, and, oddly enough, Stephen King), the three top winners are a satisfying mix of psychological realism and mild formal innovation. Best of all, they are as different from one another as chalk from cheese. Those looking for "trends" may come away disappointed, but anyone in search of a good solid read will find plenty to choose from here.
The year's first-prize pick is Peter Baida's "A Nurse's Story," a quiet, moving tale that manages to skirt sentimentality by possessing that rare literary gift, perfect pitch. "A good death. That's what everyone wants," longtime nurse Mary McDonald tells us, but Baida's story serves instead as a tribute to a good life--and all the other lives it ripples out to affect. The second-prize winner is a more unsettling and ambitious fiction, Cary Holladay's "Merry-Go-Sorry." Ostensibly about the rape and murder of three little boys, it somehow encompasses putative satanism, teenage alienation, hopeless love, grief, affliction, mystery, and everything else that makes us all human. The word merry-go-sorry "means a story with good news and bad," the accused killer's mother tells us, "joy and sorrow mixed together..." Holladay's story is indeed a merry-go-sorry, and in its juxtaposition of despair and hope it reminds us that, as in the wake of an Arkansas storm, sometimes "what's beautiful happens by accident." Rounding out the three prizewinners is a story by Alice Munro, a writer who deserves every prize extant and maybe a few not even thought of yet. Her "Save the Reaper" loosely reworks Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," but instead of a savage Southern parable, she produces what Lorrie Moore calls "a kind of pagan prayer," shot through with love, loss, mourning, and death.
Standouts from the rest of this collection include the splendid rodeo fiction "The Mud Below," by Annie Proulx, George Saunders's bizarre, tragic, and sidesplitting "Sea Oak," and something everyone either really really loves or really really hates, David Foster Wallace's footnote-enhanced "The Depressed Person." (This reviewer thinks it's funny, sad, and brilliant in an unrestrained and very Wallacean way.) As always, there are a few stories here that the clients in Saunders's male strip bar might rate "Stinker," but overall the miss-to-hit ratio is surprisingly low. Another year, another lively--and impressively vital--anthology. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
Introducing this distinguished annual collection, series editor Dark notes "the inherent subjectivity of the reading experience," an important caveat whenever an anthology pulls together stories under a "Best of the Year" heading. This year's judges, Sherman Alexie, Stephen King and Lorrie Moore, provide short essays for the three stories winning top honors. Of the 17 other tales, most earn their place here by virtue of innovation, emotional impact, or masterful imaginative leaps. Certain selections are bone-chilling, like Michael Chabon's "Son of the Wolfman," a pull-no-punches examination of a horrifying plight, pregnancy-by-rape; and Annie Proulx's "The Mud Below," a fiercely literary western tale of a bull rider. Others are eye-catching. though not always top-notch, like David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person," a logorrheic examination of privilege and depression (complete with maniacal footnotes), or "Cataract," Pam Houston's tough-talk river adventure. A rare story by Chaim Potok, about a troubled adolescent, gratifies, as do T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Underground Gardens," in which an Italian immigrant's need to dig in the earth becomes all-encompassing, and Michael Cunningham's time-lapse portrait of a beautiful, self-involved young man observed by his despairing sibling. The first-, second- and third-prize winners (Peter Baida's "A Nurse's Story," Cary Holladay's "Merry-Go-Sorry" and Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," respectively) are rich ground for debate among serious short-fiction readers: exactly how does Baida's melancholy, hopeful tale of a dying woman's courageous work organizing fellow nurses come to be ranked above all the others, including a gem by Jhumpa Lahiri and those short-listed at the book's end? But this discussion is integral to the pleasure of reading such a collection. It is somewhat disappointing that the anthology's Magazine Award again went to the obvious powerhouse, the New Yorker, when the Gettysburg Review, with two sharp stories, seemed a worthy contender. Overall, the collection is not only a keystone for readers, but, with its useful listing of magazines consulted (including addresses), a motivating force for writers. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
